


Umbrellas

by orphan_account



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, Alternate Universe - High School, M/M, Out of Character, Pining, Plants, Slow Burn, every chapter is a slam dunk into my intoxicated 1am writing brain haha thanks 'ramadhan', hhhhh, i wrote all of this drunk, i'll add more as ig o on, ish?, like keith talks a lot but idk if that counts ha
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-22
Updated: 2017-06-22
Packaged: 2018-11-17 10:27:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11273601
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Living life to the fullest is one of the hardest things to understand. What does it mean? Where can it take you? Why does it matter?In which Lance tries to come to terms with himself before he’s met with human unkindness floating among strangers.





	Umbrellas

_LANCE MCCLAIN, 15_

It’s interesting enough to waste time in the day by smoking with friends, on the way to a midday drive-in theatre, catering to whatever needs an outsider desires in exchange for green gold– when you’re in college.  
Likely, you’d also have to be of rich decent, and less sun-kissed, more so lighter-skinned and dotted with freckles instead. You’d need money, heaps of it, with a history of parents never tucking you in before bed, and a likely future of either taking up a ready-set-go business or indulging in a multi-million weed empire. Despite what the weather would be, what your papers would say, you’d have to have fun. That’s all so much easier when you’re pale, cut nicely in all the right edges and angles, and _in college_. Then, even if you were beaten up, and even if you deserved to be thrown in a cell, shut in a box for years, short on nutrition and legal care-taking, no one else would believe so.

Clearly, as I narrate, this means I am not in college– and certainly not white.

Living life to the fullest is one of the hardest things to understand. What does it mean? Where can it take you? Why does it matter?

Moving from one place to another sounds bad, even if you _are_ a cash-jaded, pallid human being. It can be stressful or relieving, but one way or another, it would be different from how you would expect it to be, because nothing would stay constantly the same as it would have been if you had just… stayed.

I moved from one place to another, too. I was an immigrant. When they check you up at the gates of ‘America’, even if you were noted a saint in every holy book accessible or to be, or if you spent your entire life paralysed and had just learned how to walk– you would feel guilty. It wasn’t a shade of guilt in which you felt like calling your dad to tell him you loved him, but it was more like a guilt that would make you sweat all over. It would make you wonder why you wasted the last pieces of cardboard and threw them away during a group project, or why you slit the soft papers of a larger poster to make an oversized paper plane. Or at least, I thought of all these things. It was concerning how much it would take me to get where I am today, and not even financially– but mentally.

It was blood-curdling to walk into the gates of a new school, everyone cheering you on as the ‘new student’ for a day, and completely dismissing you the next. It was mostly bizarre how tranquil schools can be. It wasn’t always a bright, sunny day, and when it wouldn’t be, it would be a time for me to take deep breaths and wish I were back home.

Back _home,_ you know, my _real_ home. Where all the waves gush free, and the hot sun blends with cool breezes, and it’s your go-to summer holiday most days of the year.

What usually would be calm yet confusing hallways would be a wet mess when cold winds struck town, and any closure the building could provide would be crowded with shivering, drenched bodies. The floor would be covered in rainwater and dirt, and maybe even insect eggs. It was revolting and unbearable how often it happened. Thus, from there, I decided I could go on and do different things on rainy days.

Unlike the time or the schedule high schoolers are pushed around with, weather is almost completely unpredictable. Sure, you can look at the sky, or look at the news– but kids with three hours of sleep per day can’t bother to do such mundane things. They would rather drink young wines or waste their cash on tipping street beggars that were clearly faking missing a limb, instead of watching out for what types of winds could greet them in their classrooms at any given time of day.

On my part, I would never do so either. I was always occupied with thoughts in the dark, and had insomnia ever since I was a kid. I was always enjoying tea in the mornings, before someone would slip and fall, spilling my tea all over my shirt– on rainy days. I would be holding my folders, full of homework and my pencilcase, and it would all drop to the soggy floor, after someone would bump into me– on rainy days. I would be able to talk to my favourite classmates, Hunk and Pidge, during homeroom– until I realised they would always skip for a smoke– on rainy days.

Soon enough, meaning late August, I realised that rain had always been a burden to my mornings, but not my nights. It would calm me at night, even if I couldn’t sleep. I would be able to unwind my thoughts, letting loose of paranoia and drive down lanes of serenity instead. Yet, in the mornings, from cycling to school and not having anything but a handed down poncho to help keep me hypothetically warm, I would be met with multiple episodes of unfortunate encounters, and it would twist me to the point where I couldn’t take it anymore. I made a resolution– that every rainy morning would be spent somewhere else.

On the first week, I would be walking around the schools after parking my bike to look for areas, dressed in anything but school clothes, to look around for places where I could hide from everyone for an hour or two. There were quite a few places, but none of them had the people I’d hope for– every corner that would be great to take shelter from the rain would be full of questionable hippies that ate raw beat for breakfast together. It was strange, sure, especially the fact that they would never wash the vegetable first– but the worst part was imagining having to do that with them. If anything, I’d let them be, but even pondering eating that to start my day made my stomach churn.

So, by Wednesday, after going around the whole school trying to find places that would’ve been good for me, I took my bike and instead rode out of the school from the back gate. It was odd that no one noticed, or maybe I was being let go. Either way, I had skipped a good total of six hours prior to this point.

I tried to go to places that were smaller and more cosy to find cramped spaces that were barely enough to fit my body, so that I could take naps on the down-low, but upon visiting a certain coffee shop by the name “Red”, I came to realise I was wrong.

Going to Red was a confusing journey, being that it was not open during early hours (or at least, allegedly so). I came through the door tired, and I didn’t even bother greeting the man behind the cashier. I sat down at a small table for two a few metres right of the door, on a sofa-chair, staring out the window, seeing the infuriating rain drops pitter-patter on the glass. I almost wanted to punch the frame, but I knew that the lack of physical fights I had gotten in due to my cowardice upon entering the United States would be essential to my agony after so. I guess the guy behind the cashier noticed my frustration as footsteps towards me followed a heavy sigh. I didn’t even look his way on this day for the most of our conversation, and kept my eyes fixated on my bike, wet on the pavement, and the vines growing from the top front of the short-story building that reached the bottom of the windowframe.

“Would you like anything, sir?” the man asked, uncomfortably– and I could have been kind enough to tell him the truth, and that I really didn’t care for coffee (or anything, at that), but instead, I puzzled him beyond even my own comprehension.

“Do you have boba here? Pearl Milk?”

“Excuse me?” he questioned, ripping a page out from his jotter book, as I could hear. “No, we don’t. I’m sorry. We have tea, if coffee isn’t your forte.”

“I’m good, then,” I voiced, still looking at my miserable bike that was almost drowning in the pavement, but not yet afloat. “I’d like to just sit here.” I expected for a crude comment like that to have the man understand that I was an unconventional bohemian in the tiniest ways, and that such atrociousness would keep him away, but instead, he sat down on the sofa-chair across me.

“I wish I could say that, too,” he soughed, and I could feel the weight of his elbows on the table. “I start school soon. I don’t know if I should go in this uniform. I mean, it’s technically not against the dress code– then again, whatever is shouldn’t be.”

I smiled, I guess, hearing this– it was nice to know that someone could talk quietly with a civil trail of words escaping their mouth, without them feeling guilty, embarrassed, or secretive. I wasn’t looking at him, sure, but it was interesting to know how he viewed something. He tapped the glass beside us twice, before placing his palm on the window and sighing again– “I wish I wasn’t a barista. It’s like I’m God to people of colour– I know so much about coffee, and I know how to keep pushing it out, even with great quality, suiting people’s tastes– but I hate it nonetheless, and it goes around with bad luck.”

“You’re a nonbeliever?” I asked, listless in shape, but with how he was talking, undoubtedly interested.

“Yeah, and Asian,” he said, breathing onto the glass. I looked his way here, and I don’t regret it one bit. For once, my anxiety wasn’t yelling at me and tugging at my insides, and I wasn’t feeling any stomach butterflies or heartbeat marathons either. It was just pretty– he had his hair in a ponytail, and his face sat on a clean-cut head shape that was nothing short of mesmerising to look at. I smiled again, and then closed my eyes– I remembered the bike that was submerged in the plashes outside, and I remembered the fact that school was about to start, but I didn’t care at all.

“Shit, school’s starting,” he hesitated, hands shifting all directions on the table, “I don’t have anything to go with.”

“Is my bike good enough?” I asked, opening my eyes slowly. “I’m fine with you using it, as long as you return it soon enough.”

“You’re wearing a uniform under that jacket, aren’t you?”

He was right.

“Yes.”

“Then you need it more than I do,” he huffed. He got a text, though, and then he sat back and relaxed. “Nevermind, no big deal.”

“Come again? Wait, are you skipping?”

“You could say that,” he smiled, “but it’s all good. My friend, an upperclassman, negotiated with some officials.”

“You can get off school with _negotiation_?”

“Essentially. It isn’t hard to get straight As, you know,” he murmured, “ and that’s only a bit of the excuse. There’s something else to it.”

“What’s that?”

“I’m looking for some sort of home, I guess. For now, I live in the room back there,” he said, pointing at where I believe the kitchen was. “If I get enough cash, I’ll try to find a place, but that’s helpless at this point. It’s kind of like a half-assed version of putting themselves in my shoes, because they can let me off for days at a time but not give me any money. This place is owned by that friend, by the way.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing, really,” he muttered, “it’s… well, I don’t know. Is being an orphan really a big deal? Is it to you?”

“Nah,” I said, as we turned to look at my bike again, “but I never knew how it felt. My parents don’t look me in the eye, but they’re _there,_ so it’s different, right? Like, they pay my tuition, but they don’t pay me attention. But they’re in my life.”

“Living as an orphan here is both overrated and underrated,” he laughed, or giggled at most– a finger circling a spot on the table. “People think you’re super free, and whatnot– I guess I can be, since I was never really adopted by proper foster parents. But here’s the catch– I was pulled in and out of foster homes across the country until I finally settled in this town three years ago. Even that was against my will.”

He stopped to catch his breath for a while, and he looked down to his book bag before looking back up for us to finally meet eyes. After locking like that for about nine seconds, he looked back down at his hands, and mine. “I have no clue of my real heritage, and that’s why I haven’t been taken in by any relatives of some sort. I was an orphan for all I can remember, but in my diaries that I wrote as a five-year-old, I’m proven wrong.”

“What?”

“Uh, I don’t know. I was apparently only an orphan from age five. Before that, I guess I had caretakers.”

“Ah, right,” I sighed, “they must be dicks.”

“They could be dead, but I don’t know. Hah, I’ve never–”

He paused,

“I’ve never had anyone put it to me straight like that. Everyone’s making cuts to excuses or empathy towards them. Even me, myself. Maybe you’re right. Maybe they _were_ dicks,”

he continued.

“Oh,” he started again, “and you’re a private school kid, huh?”

“What– oh, no, the uniform doesn’t mean much. The school I go to used to be a private military base, and boom, shifted to public school a few years back, like– one or two, I guess. Everyone still wears these uniforms up to junior year, apparently.”

“Military base?”

“Training, for teens. Seems cruel, I guess. I don’t know too much about it either.”

“Show me.”

I got up and took the jacket off, with great caution– the rain was cold, and I was nervous, because unlike how people assume, I don’t really sit with people who view my skin early on. I guess it didn’t matter, because I didn’t see myself coming back to the café anytime soon. I showed him the shoulder with the plated gold badge that I knew I could have never afforded had it been on its own. I breathed before asking him if he knew anything about it, followed with him nodding slightly.

“I could have ended up there,” he smiled.

“Why couldn’t you? Didn’t pass? Ah, no, you’d pass for sure.” He chuckled, then looking to his shoes, and I felt like I screwed up a bit. “Wait… no, did you– sorry.”

“No, I don’t mean the school,” he guffawed, “I meant the military base. Two years ago, my foster parents were thinking of sending me there instead. That’s when I left them to live near this place, and a few months ago, I finished up my shift and moved in here.”

“Ah, right,” I sighed, noticing that he was fairly well-built, and a solid-hearted guy. I could see why someone, even in the wrong mind, would think of sending him off to a military training base. “Oh, and you thought– you said that being an orphan was underrated? How so?”

“For the most part, I don’t have to care about religion. I can wake up whenever I want on holidays, and I can go wherever I want.”

“That _does_ sound pretty cool,” I commented, “but there are some drawbacks. Right, okay, I get it now.”

“Excuse me?” he interjected, “You can’t be serious.”

“No, I mean, I get it? From… an outsider’s point of view. I don’t and won’t romanticise you trying to find your roots, or you being free. It’s outlined, kind of, now.” “That’s good,” he grinned, “and it’s fine. You can dick around with me.”

“Really? Wait… but why?”

“Skipping class together,” he started, “on an extremely rainy day, talking about whatever this is we’re talking about. Friends.”

“Friends,” I gleed, reaching my hand out for him to shake– it looked like he was surely going to retreat and reject, but instead, after a few moments, he reached for his from under the table and he shook hands with me.

—

“Are you coming back anytime soon?” he asked, opening the door for me, as the streets dried up, now over an hour after when I came.

“I’m not sure. I’ve skipped so much without any proper justification that I’m probably morally good not going to school at all.”

He didn’t even do anything in response but smile. I left.

**Author's Note:**

> I can't even remember how many times I've tried to write. I hope this works out– numbers have always been a big drawback to my motivation, but hey, if I've been awarded for writing in school, I might as well try it leisurely.
> 
> (kinda like a bootleg garden of words remixed au, i guess. hah)
> 
> Special thanks to Aoki for editing everything and posting. He edits all my drunk writing, and is even editing this sentence (dont edit this out you donk) <3


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